Types of Humorous Stock Characters

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

During the hundreds and hundreds of years during which humor has been developed, a number of humorous stock characters have been developed. We are familiar with many of them, not so much from the stage as from television situation comedies and stand-up comedians’ personas. An awareness of such characters can help us to people our own short stories, novels, scripts, and screenplays with the same types of humorous characters, giving them the special and unique twists that only we can provide, based upon our own personalities, backgrounds, and experiences.

Some of the more common humorous stock characters are the country bumpkin, the con artist, the egghead, the fish out of water (displaced person), the hypocrite, and the blowhard.

The Beverly Hillbillies, a television situation comedy, features perhaps the quintessential country bumpkin of modern times. Jethro Bodine is a nephew to Jed Clampett, the “mountaineer” whose discovery of oil on his property in Bug Tussle, Tennessee, allows him to move his family to a mansion in elegant Beverly Hills, California. As a result, the entire family--Jed, Granny, Elly May, and Jethro--become fish out of water.

Much of the series’ more obvious comedy revolves around Jethro. After twelve years in school, Jethro manages to pass the sixth grade, and, as a result, the others defer to him in matters of arithmetic and other academic subjects. He recites aloud mnemonics associated with division whenever he must perform this operation, and refers to arithmetic as “ciphering.” Possessed of a tremendous appetite, he loves Granny’s cooking of such delicacies as crawdad and ‘possum
stew.

He constantly seeks employment opportunities that would showcase his business and leadership skills--or those, at any rate, that he imagines he has. He becomes (always on a short-term and to disastrous effect) a brain surgeon, a Hollywood producer, and a bullfighter, and he joins the army, buying himself a tank for practicing drills, to impress women.

He considers himself quite a playboy, never suspecting that attractive women put up with his ignorance, crudity, and boorish behavior only because of his uncle’s wealth. He thinks, too, that topless dancers perform without wearing hats. The normal denizens of Beverly Hills or the businesses in which Jethro works, however briefly, are his foils.

Green Acres’ Mr. Haney is an example par excellence of the con artist. Not only is he the character who sells New York City attorney Oliver Wendell Douglas and his beautiful, scatterbrained wife Lisa a ramshackle farm outside the town of Hooterville, but he also returns, time after time, to sell Oliver a mind-boggling array of junk from his well-stocked truck.

His technique was as simple as it proved effective (Oliver almost always ended up buying whatever was being offered for sale): The fast-talking Mr. Haney would invent some absurd, polysyllabic name for a useless or broken item, assign it a purpose or use that it did not have and could not serve, indicate that it was of inexpressible value, and do his customer the “favor” or “service” of letting him purchase the invaluable object for the fraction of its true value that Mr. Haney was asking for it. His truck was equipped with a pull-down sign that displayed the very item of merchandise that Mr. Haney just happened to be selling. The gravellyvoiced, unctuous character fairly oozed with the oil of the Western frontier’s snake oil salesman.

Major Charles Winchester of the television situation comedy M*A*S*H is a good example of the egghead. An arrogant, pompous, and condescending airbag, the Army surgeon would come across as contemptible rather than humorous except for his genuine, if not readily apparent, compassion for his patients and his capacity to develop authentic friendships, over time, with his colleagues.

A sort of curmudgeon, he his humanity behind the façade of the misanthropic and superior aristocrat, pretending to be better than others and to know it all. His surgical technique was brilliant, but, he found, it didn’t meet the needs of the “meatball surgery” that his fellow surgeons found necessary to tend to combat injuries in the less-than-ideal conditions of a mobile Army surgical hospital, or MASH.

Through dramatic irony, the show’s writers often let the audience in on the secret of the doctor’s humanity by showing him contributing to a charity, feeling homesick, and treating lesser officers with dignity and respect rather than pulling rank on them or putting them on report for their often-unmilitary behavior, although Winchester‘s fellow characters often did not see him perform such actions. In addition, he did his utmost to save his patients and grieved over the loss of any of them. Despite his know-it-all attitude concerning surgery, culture, and the good life, Winchester endeared himself to audiences and to many of his fellow characters because of the compassionate and humane values and characteristics he displayed, if with occasional embarrassment and reluctance.

The television situation comedy Gilligan’s Island also featured an exemplary egghead in the character of Professor Roy Hinkley. Much of the professor’s time was spent in inventing bizarre contraptions, often of bamboo, that were intended either to facilitate his and his fellow castaways’ rescue from the island on which they washed up after their yacht, The Minnow, capsized, or to help them to become more comfortable on the island as they awaited rescue.

A character can overlap two or more types. For example, as we mentioned earlier, Jethro Bodine is not only a country bumpkin, but he is also a fish out of water, or a displaced person, as are the other members of his family, Uncle Jed Clampett, Granny, and cousin Elly May Clampett.

The fish out of water is a displaced person. He or she is out of place, emotionally or actually. He or she is taken out of a familiar environment. Then, this character is placed in unfamiliar surroundings. He or she is a stranger in a strange land. As such, the fish out of water has trouble functioning according to the new community‘s standards. He or she makes many mistakes. Some are errors in judgment. Others errors are due to miscommunication. Still others are caused by mistaken beliefs or false assumptions. This character usually tries to fit in. Often, he or she wants to belong. This character tries to play his or her assigned role.

The fish out of water often appears in sitcoms. This character may also appear in stories with more serious themes. He or she may be a foil to socially pretentious behavior. He or she may express other social criticisms. This character may replace someone who belongs in the position that he or she takes. Then, he or she can show what life is like in both sets of circumstances. This character’s use also lets writers look at familiar situations and themes in a fresh way.

Every fish out of water character has at least one (and usually several) foils, for it is by opposition that the displaced character is shown as different from the rest of the characters and how, specifically, he or she is different.

The Clampett’s vocabulary alone suggests their unrefined stature and ignorance. They refer to their estate’s swimming pool as a “cement pond.” Their billiard table is considered a “fancy eating table” for company dinners, and the cue sticks are believed to be used to pass pots across the table; sharpened, they become instruments for impaling meat. The family thinks flamingos are oversize pink chickens. Later, the Clampetts plow their front lawn to grow their own vegetables. Golf balls are the eggs of a mysterious underground “critter.” Elly May tried to cook some, after melting them, “shells” and all. Granny thinks an escaped kangaroo is a gigantic jackrabbit. Because of their dress, they are sometimes mistaken for servants, and they mistake a butler for a tenant of the rooming house they turn their mansion into in one episode.

The series’ humor (and social criticism) also results from the Clampett’s next-door neighbors, the Drysdales. Mr. Drysdale is Jed’s banker, and, consequently, he argues that admittance into the rarified strata of the upper class depends upon nothing more than one’s wealth, whereas his arrogant spouse insists that one must be born into the upper crust. To save money, Mr. Drysdale orders his bank’s employees to obtain their healthcare from Granny, who makes dubious home remedies from a variety of exotic substances.

The Drysdales--and their whole way of life--are major foils to Jethro and the Clampetts. When the banker advises Jed to invest in stocks, the hillbilly buys cows, pigs, and chickens to raise on his estate. When Mrs. Drysdale’s son, Sonny, leads Elly May on before jilting her, the Clampetts feud with the Drysdales.

Granny rides the racehorse Mr. Drysdale gives the Clampetts back and forth to the store and later buys matching horses and buggies for Mrs. Drysdale and herself so they can compete in races with one another.

A number of con artists try to part Jed from his money, always without success. In one instance, a con man attempts to sell him Central Park. Another tries to get Jed to buy a fan that is supposedly big enough to blow the smog out of Los Angeles. Still another get Jed to buy local landmarks such as the Hollywood Bowl and a freeway. Their behavior suggests how greedy, unprincipled men will take advantage of honest, though unsophisticated people. The Beverly Hillbillies’ use of Jethro and the Clampetts allowed the show’s writers to poke fun at both the upper and the lower classes, but, usually, Jethro and the Clampetts were portrayed in a more positive light than the Drysdales and other wealthy and successful business leaders.

Television situation comedy Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s Will Smith is another excellent example of a fish out of water. Will is a street-smart, if not exactly, street-tough youth from the inner city streets of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When he gets into trouble, his mother sends him to live with his aunt and uncle, Philip and Vivian Banks, their sons, Carlton and Nicky, and their daughter Ashley.

Will’s uncle is a judge, his aunt is a professor, and his cousin is a preppy who, according to Will, may not be quite “black” enough. The family lives in a mansion, complete with servants, in the exclusive Los Angeles community of Bel-Air. His newfound family and their lifestyle are everything that Will is not. Their wealth, politics, education, values, interests, and even their mode of speech, dress, and demeanor. Upon his arrival in their neighborhood, Will becomes a fish out of water. Much of the television series’ humor derives from Will’s trying to understand, adapt to, and fit in with his new environment. In addition, a good deal of the humor results from the opposition of Will’s character to those of such foils as Carlton and Ashley.

Since The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is a situation comedy, rather than a stand-alone story, we’ll dip into several episodes to compile a list of incidents and situations that showcase Will’s nature as a fish out of water character.

Will has preconceived ideas as to what it means to be black, most of which he acquired from his own experience as a resident of an all-black, inner city neighborhood, and few of which accord with the Banks’ lifestyle. When his notions don’t coincide with the realities of his new environment, he often defends his ideas against these new realities, claiming that there is something wrong with those characters, whether the character is Carlton, Ashley, or someone else, rather than with his own beliefs as to what should and shouldn’t be considered “black.”

His aunt and uncle are held up by his mother as examples of successful blacks, which implies that neither she nor Will are successful, since their lives are nothing like those of their wealthy West Coast relatives. Will has had trouble with the law, which his Ivy league-educated uncle, as a judge, represents. Uncle Philip’s Republican political beliefs and support do not mesh with Will’s political values.

Will has many more opportunities to learn about life and people in Bel-Air than he is likely to have had in Philadelphia. He works at a variety of jobs, including a part on a daytime soap opera, salesman at Mulholland Motors, a costumed waiter at the Brawny Deep, a waiter at Chelsea’s Touchdown sports bar, a yellow chicken for a television commercial, and a assistant on his cousin’s TV show, The Hilary Show. Will also meets such celebrities as William Shatner and Jay Leno. These experiences teach him that not everyone believes, thinks, feels, and acts as the acquaintances he left behind in Philadelphia and that life offers possibilities beyond basketball, street gangs, and rap music. Such incidents and situations also allow opportunities for gentle criticisms of social institutions.

Moliere’s Tartuffe offers a perfect example of the hypocrite. Hypocrisy results from a discrepancy between what one says and what one does. The action does not match the words. For example, a person who affects to be an honest man but who cheats widows, orphans, and the physically disabled is a hypocrite because he preaches honesty, as it were, but, by his actions, shows himself to be a dishonest person.

Tartuffe is supposedly a man of surpassingly great religious zeal. He is alleged to have the precepts of Jesus, as taught by the church, ever before him and to insist on a true and pious devotion to these teachings at all times. In reality, Tartuffe is a schemer and a fraud, utterly devoid of the attributes he champions and an absolute scoundrel who seeks to seduce a man’s wife and cheat the same man, Orgon, out of his wealth and property and to marry his daughter.

The rest of Orgon’s family sees through Tartuffe’s flimsy pretenses, but Orgon, the master of the house, remains deceived until it is too late and Tartuffe has stolen the other’s wealth and property. It is only as Tartuffe is evicting the family that he is arrested on the order of the king, who has heard of the hypocrite’s chicanery and has ordered that he be taken into custody. Moliere’s comedy offended many, causing him to write a defense of the work, which sheds light on the nature of humor and comedy:

The comic is the outward and visible form that nature's bounty has attached to everything unreasonable, so that we should see, and avoid, it. To know the comic we must know the rational, of which it denotes the absence and we must see wherein the rational consists . . . incongruity is the heart of the comic . . . it follows that all lying,
disguise, cheating, dissimulation, all outward show different fromthe reality, all contradiction in fact between actions that proceedfrom a single source, all this is in essence comic.

Another excellent example of the hypocrite is the Pardoner in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. A representative of the church, he sells indulgences to sinners while, at the same time, urging them to sin as much as they like, since he can and will as readily sell them the remedies to their transgressions, the indulgences which he hawks to them.

As a prelude to his offering of his stock of indulgences for sale to his listeners, he preaches against the sin of greed, but it is this very sin that motivates his every deed, including both his sermons and the sales of indulgences which follow them. In addition to the indulgences which he sells, the Pardoner also sells worthless pigs’ bones, ordinary metal, and other worthless artifacts, declaring them to be genuine holy relics. He openly delights in his ability to dupe the simple folk who gather around him to buy their way out of the punishments of purgatory and to ease their consciences and freely admits that he is unconcerned with the eternal fate of those who entrust their souls to him and to the worthless trinkets he sells them. His honesty about his dishonesty and his slight silliness make him rather an endearing character, despite the monstrous nature of his character as a hypocrite and a swindler without conscience or compassion. Obviously, Chaucer uses this character as a means to criticize the more blatant abuses of the church and its clerics at the outset of the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance. This critical dimension also makes the Pardoner a more acceptable, if not exactly likeable, character.

The blowhard is an annoying braggart, or one who bloviates or boasts, especially when he or she has little, if anything, about which to blow his or her own horn. One of the great blowhards is Sir John Falstaff, the obese, lying, conniving, drunken knight in William Shakespeare’s plays, King Henry IV, Part I, King Henry IV, Part II, and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

A companion to the carousing Prince Hal, he is both vainglorious and cowardly and prefers to spend his time feasting, drinking, and womanizing rather than fighting. Prince Hal characterizes the knight as “that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox.” He lies, swearing his falsehoods to be true; interprets Christian doctrine loosely or wrongly, often to his own advantage (as does Chaucer’s Wife of Bath), is openly sensuous and hedonistic, considers the idea of honor as worthless as a “mere scrutcheon,” and keeps a bottle of sack (wine) in his holster, rather than a pistol. A corrupting influence upon the young prince, to whose delinquency he contributes mightily, the eternal partygoer brags about every aspect of his service as a knight, as he does concerning his immense appetites for food, drink, sex, and other fleshly desires, telling Prince Hal that, to “banish plump Jack” would be to “banish all the world.” In this exaggerated estimate of his own worth, the knight is ironically telling the truth, for, in his carnal appetites, hedonistic nature, and zest for life and all its physical pleasures, if not necessarily its moral responsibilities, Falstaff truly does represent all that Christianity regards as “the world,” or “worldliness.”

Many other stock characters are common to humorous stories and comedies. Descriptions of many of them appear in “Appendix A: An Excerpt of Character Writings of the 17th Century.” In availing yourself of these character sketches, it’s advisable to translate them, as it were, into more modern terms, by which operation they shall be made more intelligible, and then to make such revisions as seem necessary or prudent so that they better fit these, rather than earlier, times. Here is an example; the original is provided first, with the paraphrase following:

AN AFFECTED TRAVELLER (ORIGINAL)

Is a speaking fashion; he hath taken pains to be ridiculous, and hath seen more than he hath perceived. His attire speaks French or Italian, and his gait cries, Behold me. He censures all things by countenances and shrugs, and speaks his own language with shame and lisping; hewill choke rather than confess beer good drink, and his pick-tooth is a main part of his behavior. He chooseth rather to be counted a spy than not a politician, and maintains his reputation by naming great men familiarly.

He chooseth rather to tell lies than not wonders, and talks with men singly; his discourse sounds big, but means nothing; and his boy is bound to admire him howsoever. He comes still from great personages, but goes with mean. He takes occasion to show jewels given him in regard of his virtue, that were bought in St. Martin's; and not long after having with a mountebank's method pronounced them worth thousands, impawned them for a few shillings. Upon festival days he goes to court, and salutes without resaluting; at night in an ordinary he canvasseth the business in hand, and seems as conversant with all intents and plots as if he begot them. His extraordinary account of men is, first to tell them the ends of all matters of consequence, and then to borrow money of them; he offers courtesies to show them, rather than himself, humble.

He disdains all things above his reach, and preferreth all countries before his own. He imputeth his want and poverty to the ignorance of the time, not his own nworthiness; and concludes his discourse with half a period, or a word, and leaves the rest to imagination. In a word, his religion is fashion, and both body and soul are governed by fame; he loves most voices above truth.

AN AFFECTED TRAVELLER (PARAPRASED)

He’s ridiculous, understanding little that he sees. Swaggering around in French or Italian clothing, he dismisses everything with a smirk or a shrug. Lisping, he speaks his own language with shame. He’d rather choke than admit that beer’s a good drink, and he customarily uses a toothpick to clean his teeth. He’d rather be considered a spy than a politician, and he’s a name-dropper. He’s a liar, and he talks with men individually; his speech is pompous but meaningless. Although he says he has important ancestors, he keeps low company. He makes a point of showing themedals he’s been given for his virtue, but, actually, he bought themin St. Martin’s; and, not long after having fraudulently declared themto be worth thousands, he pawns them for mere pennies. During festivals, he offers token greetings. At night, from a cab, he takes in the business at hand, assuming the casual air of one who’s financed everything. He tells men what’s important and then borrows moneyfrom them. His courtesies are meant to humble others, rather than toshow his own humility. He puts down anything he can’t have and prefers any other country to his own. He says he’s poor because he’s ahead of his time, not because he’s unworthy, and he leaves sentences unfinished to let others finish his thoughts. He worshipsfashion, fame; and praise.

Another way to compile a list of humorous stock characters is simply to review various situation comedies that you have watched and make note of, and describe, in some detail, the various other such characters that you have seen in such shows. For example, on Bewitched, Darrin and Samantha Stevens are plagued by nosy neighbor Gladys Kravitz and Gladys’ longsuffering husband Abner. In the persons, so to speak, of Samantha’s family of witches and warlocks, there is a cavalcade of eccentric minor characters as well, including Samantha’s vain and catty mother Endora, her aristocratic, womanizing father Maurice, her bumbling, perhaps senile Aunt Clara.

The Andy Griffith Show’s Deputy Barney Fife, as pompous as he is incompetent, is a classic example of the humorous sidekick (as is Cervantes’ Sancho Panza, page to the zany knight Don Quixote).

Household servants, whether lazy, wise, sarcastic, belligerent, or otherwise, are another humorous stock character, appearing in such diverse situation comedies as Hazel, The Jeffersons, The Brady Bunch, Family Affair, and Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Eccentric or irascible coworkers, such as those on Cheers, Taxi, Ally McBeal, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and Alice are tried-and-true humorous stock characters as well. (If you are not familiar with some of these shows, you can watch many of them, free, on the Fancast.com, Hulu.com, and other websites; doing so will enhance your understanding of such characters and how to create them.)



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